Lawton: A City Born in a Day

Some cities take generations to find their shape. Lawton, Oklahoma took about a day.

This corner of southwestern Oklahoma was the last piece of Indian Territory opened to white settlement. For years it had been the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache reservation, home to peoples who had been forced onto it after the Southern Plains wars ended in the eighteen seventies. By the turn of the century the federal government had decided, as it had decided before with other tribal lands, that the reservation was too much land for too few people. The allotment process subdivided it into individual parcels for tribal members, and whatever remained would be opened for homesteading.

To avoid the violence that had marred earlier land runs, where settlers on horseback and by bicycle raced for claims and people cheated, fought, and died for quarter-sections. The government tried something different this time. A lottery. Beginning in July of nineteen oh one, nearly thirty thousand potential settlers registered at Fort Sill and at El Reno. Their names went into a drawing. Winners got first pick of claims.

On August sixth, nineteen oh one, Lawton was surveyed and opened. Within hours it had a population in the thousands. Within weeks it had banks, hotels, and newspapers. The government had platted a town site south of Fort Sill, and the lots sold fast. It was named for Major General Henry Lawton, an army officer who had served in the campaigns against Geronimo and been killed in the Philippines in eighteen ninety-nine during the American colonial war there.

Today Lawton and Fort Sill are inseparable, the city and the post each defining the other. The Comanche Nation is still here too, headquartered in Lawton, on the same land the lottery divided.